Plagiarizing papers retracted from engineering journal after Retraction Watch report

An Elsevier journal has retracted three papers for plagiarism after more than a year of inaction. 

As we reported in August, the editor of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in June 2023 promised to retract the articles, but they remained intact more than a year later.

The following papers have now been retracted:

• A robust vehicle to grid aggregation framework for electric vehicles charging cost minimization and for smart grid regulation (18 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science)
• A robust optimization method for optimizing day-ahead operation of the electric vehicles aggregator (20 citations)
• Optimal power management framework for smart homes using electric vehicles and energy storage (31 citations)

The notices call the plagiarism a “severe abuse of the scientific publishing system.” The journal’s editor in chief, Vladimir Terzija, did not respond to our request for comment.

A spokesperson for Elsevier told us “The retractions were submitted during a busy period and there were delays with the publisher,” adding that the authors did not make the retraction request.

Ubaid ur Rehman, the first or only author of all three papers, previously had two other articles retracted from Springer Nature journals for plagiarism. ur Rehman did not respond to our request for comment but previously admitted the plagiarism in emails seen by Retraction Watch. He has over the past week asked us to remove our original post because the retractions were in the works.

Salvador Pineda, one of the authors whose work was lifted, said he was “relieved” considering how much time and energy he invested in getting the paper that plagiarized his work retracted. 

“That said, I’m still puzzled as to why the process took so long, even though the plagiarism was blatant, the author admitted to it, and the editor-in-chief supported retraction from the very beginning. I can only imagine how difficult it would be if the plagiarism hadn’t been so obvious,” Pineda, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Málaga, told Retraction Watch. 

“The journal should put more efforts to avoid the plagiarism rather than waiting for the authors to report the events,” said Tao Huang, another author whose work was plagiarized and a professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy. He recommended further penalties such as banning authors temporarily, from both the journal the plagiarized articles were published in and other journals by the same publisher. 

“Surely, it is not a pleasant experience, but it was OK in the end,” Huang told us. 

The “delays” referred to by Elsevier resulted in the plagiarized papers accumulating several new citations, Pineda said, about two dozen since June 2023. “In any case, I’m happy that truth and science have prevailed in the end.”

Update, 2230 UTC, 10/18/24: We have corrected the number of previous retractions of papers by ur Rehman before these three papers; it was two, not three.

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